The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

What I'm working on

Added 2019-08-15 13:32:36 +0000 UTC

Hey patrons! A quick update to let you know what's happening in the Exciting Universe. It came to my attention that in my theory pages about scales, some of the notated examples were using weird spelling choices. So for the past month I've been taking a deep dive into algorithms for pitch spelling, hoping to find a satisfactory way that a set of pitch class numbers (eg, [0,2,3,5,7,8,11]) can be mapped to pitches (eg [C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, B]).

Along the way I've been consulting with Uzay Bora, a theorist who has worked extensively on this precise question. His University has kindly granted me permission to use his work to render scales, but has NOT permitted me to repackage his algorithms in open-source software. So right now I'm running "rendering tests" of his methods to see the effect that various heuristics have on the pitch spelling algorithm. The results are *mostly* good, but I'm not fully satisfied in some cases. I think the next step is going to involve training a Machine Learning algorithm on a set of acceptable spellings, then see if I can find coefficients that will produce the desired output. FUN TIMES.

The outcome of all this will be - hopefully - an implementation that I'll be allowed to publish and include as an open source tool in the PHPMusicTools library. But moreso the real end goal is I want all the scales to be spelled in a sensible and consistent way in all the Exciting Universe materials.

Thanks for your support!